23ish years after the Free-PC ended, we've come back around. What a world.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/30/business/no-more-giveaway...
9,936 karma · joined January 2, 2010
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/30/business/no-more-giveaway...
(This business model is why we are seeing a rise in junk fees and "surcharges". Airlines and cable companies and hotels got away with it for so long with no major pushback that everyone else feels emboldened in light of this economic slowdown.)
We should take care of the planet. We all live on it and catastrophic heat waves and extreme weather are not polite and do not respect the thick black lines we've drawn on maps.
For avoidance of doubt, I am absolutely saying that if those of us who are citizens or residents of the United States, European Union (with or without the United Kingdom), Australia, Canada, Japan, and anywhere else anyone might think of needs to take a hit to our net incomes and economic circumstances in order to keep the planet habitable, I am all for it.
I hope that both the person to whom you are replying and their users and bosses remember that once someone has that level of control, it's not really that user's device any more.
Where I work, we debated this sort of setup, but rejected it in favor of NFC Yubikeys largely on privacy grounds. We had several employees (doctors and nurses among them, since we are a medical practice) object to a device management profile, especially because of the remote wipe permission.
Instead, we adopted Yubikeys and an automated provisioning process with a break-glass procedure if someone gets locked out.
Due to this, I'm in the process of changing over all of my regular banking stuff to them right now.
(They are also the only remaining US issuer of proper chip-and-PIN payment cards, so far as I know.)
Why aren't they? It reads to me like you are making the same presumption, just in the other direction, without the support you see as lacking in the original quote. Please forgive me if I've missed something vital.
This is why there are no more "No" selections. The developers--from marketing to the people who ask ChatGPT to spit out the required Python code and then paste it into a GitHub repository--all have financial motivations for you to say "Yes".
I'm sure some people do hold this view, but I've never met someone who's buying a vehicle and looks into how well it deals with people outside of the vehicle as part of safety considerations. While pictures of lifted trucks and high-bumper vehicles are fairly common posts on Twitter, usually for dunks, people still buy SUVs and crossovers that are known to be unsafe to those outside of them. Often this is disguised as "but I need it to go skiing once a year" or "what if I need to drive the entire soccer team home?"
The mindset of drivers, and especially Tesla's corporate view of it, channels Lord Farquaad. "Some of you [pedestrians] may die and that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
For example, there's a credit union near me that advertises second-chance checking accounts. The account costs $7 per month and you have to take a $25 personal finance literacy course (that wasn't offered during the pandemic).
This is why the games I play on my iPhone and iPad come exclusively from Apple Arcade. There really is some great art there: Don't Starve, Stitch, Cozy Grove, Alto's Odyssey, Oregon Trail, and more.
The difference is Apple Arcade absolutely forbids the in-game microtransaction mess. You can see where it's been removed in games like Star Trek: Legends or Jetpack Joyride. What's really interesting is these are really good games in their own right once you get to play the game to earn the rewards and progress. The only thing standing in their way is the microtransaction crap, which is sad.
It's frustrating to watch and I empathize with people who feel like their cherished shows of before are being "ruined" by spin-offs or reboots.
This is exactly it for me. The job I've held for many years is in Seattle's city limits and my family has lived in Seattle for even longer. I intentionally looked for a job here because I gave up driving years ago, as did my wife. My children have never learned to drive or have a license.
Meanwhile, many of my colleagues have moved to Auburn or Kent or Edmonds or Snohomish, insisting that it's not possible to raise a child in the city (my kids would beg to disagree) or seeking the "American Dream" of a standalone house. But every single one of them complained about the hours of their lives they were giving away in exchange for that.
I think it's fine to build transit to the suburbs. It doesn't have to be light rail, though there's a well-known rail bias, but we've proven that frequent express buses from regional centers can work. Commuting is a drag, that's why I don't do it.
(My employer also went to open plan spaces for technical and administrative staff before the pandemic. As we are a medical group, doctors still had their own doors, of course. Now, we have sold one office building and given up the lease on another. Technical and admin staff are fully remote but can use a company-paid WeWork account if we like. Medical staff are in the remaining office building and our patient care locations.)
Also, a lot of not-for-profit entities intentionally branch out because such is the nature of helping the group of people they want to help. The term for it is intersectionality. That not-for-profits are heavily siloed is less a matter of intent and more a matter of history. If you are a food bank, you recognize that your intended client base needs food. But, second-order to that, why do they need to come to you? Is it because they need a job? Well, they're already here, so why not engage in skills enhancement and training? And since you'll be at the city council anyway doing advocacy for access to food, why not also advocate for more housing? If those continue to be siloed, you wind up with three separate groups, working at separate-but-related aims, each with their own overhead and inefficiencies.
It's vertical integration, in the not-for-profit advocacy space.
And in the case of the original Angry Birds, Rovio even removed it from the app stores (and renamed it for past purchases to "Red's First Flight") because of the "game's impact" on their portfolio and business model.
There are some games in there, like the Star Trek one, that are clearly IAP-infested outside of Apple Arcade. You can see the inflection points and the spots where you'd be prompted to "buy" more "transporter power" or whatever. But like watching an American TV show on British TV, where the action fades to black (for a commercial) then comes right back, these are both jarring and interesting. The game would be perfectly playable, and arguably more interesting, without these points but the developers wouldn't be able to hook their whales so they exist elsewhere.
FWIW, Barnes and Noble operates its own brand, Barnes and Noble Cafe, that isn't a licensed Starbucks.
Licensed stores have full branding and, these days, accept stars as discounts and purchases there accrue stars. The third category (corporate and licensed being the first two) is "We Proudly Serve", meaning the business isn't a Starbucks but has an agreement to sell some or all of the 'bux product line.
I don't mean to be unduly harsh (yet probably will come across that way anyway) but did we have to drag that into this conversation? I have lived in Seattle my entire life, was born in Ballard, and raised two kids here. It's getting kind of frustrating that every time my hometown comes up, someone inevitably mentions this without bringing up any of the complexities as to why. (For one, it would be nice if your suburb, nominally one of Seattle's regional partners in the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, would actually do their part and construct some social services for various groups.)
Our mayor, who lives half-time in Bellevue I hasten to point out, is busy saying it's all the Council's fault and the Council passes budget items and ordinances that the mayor simply ignores. Meanwhile, every city in the region is busy shoving everyone who looks like they earn less than $75,000 per year over to Seattle and then crying about how Seattle is "doing nothing".
The Council is attempting to do something good, so sure, let's bring up the massive social services crisis that's by no means unique to Seattle or Puget Sound, but probably looks like a Seattle-specific problem from a perch on the Eastside.
How do you fit two full BGP tables into 512MB of RAM? I've looked into MikroTik boxes before and maybe they're doing something I'm not understanding. On the routers I have manage, two IPv4 feeds take up about 1.1GB and three IPv6 adds another 450MB.
Completely agreed. Seattle and Portland seem to be high on the list of "places telcos think they can take complete advantage of." For what my employer pays for two (locked) racks of colocation here, we could get an entire small suite somewhere like LA or Chicago.
Wireline costs are similarly sky high, I think because CenturyLink has all of the cabling and no one has bothered to dig up the streets to run any more. When we connected a building in Eastlake to our old colo in Tukwila, CenturyLink was the only one who would quote us.
For what it's worth, this isn't the same as what the person who wrote the post did. They bought a DIA circuit to an ISP.
What you're seeking is a point-to-point fiber link or MPLS to a panel in KOMO Plaza or the Westin building. You don't need to be near either of those locations to do it and CenturyLink (Lumen, these days) will sell you the circuit but you're not going to like what it costs. We have three of these circuits where I work and they are juuuuust a bit higher than what the article's author says they're paying for the DIA.
(This, along with the eyewatering cross-connect fees that the operators of those two facilities charge, is why getting a SIX port is so expensive on retail colo. You're either paying for the privilege of running some strands of glass or you're paying to use someone's extension switch and the connection they're paying for to get back to the SIX core.)
This is exactly it for me, there's no way to tell the computer "this is what I want you to do." Maybe it's because product designers don't want to tell the user no. If something does fail to work, we couch it in language like "oops, something went wrong, we're very sorry" with no further hint of what to do next.
Sometimes I just want the big database in the sky to tell me what it knows about a specific string of characters; this seems like it should be straightforward but I suppose it isn't.
The funny thing is, this is why companies were in San Francisco. Back when the tech industry was far less than it is now, San Francisco was "a reasonable CoL but still nice to live in" even though it was all the way over there in California.
Then San Francisco got expensive so people tried Seattle...then Denver...then Austin...and so the wheel turns. And each time, we fail to learn the lessons of what made those places get more expensive as more people wanted to move there. Then we try again somewhere else, expecting that new people won't have the back story and existing people will happily move.
I've been working on computers for a job for decades and we still haven't gotten it right.
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/300/2m1207b-first-imag...
I just want to point out that you're largely proving my point. I got started on saving later in my career because the first few years were spent laboring under the idea that pensions existed. (The 401k was rolled out after I got my first job, for example.)
We had the rug pulled, and there are a lot of GenX people who are going to be in a lot worse situation than me, someone who was lucky enough to get into a high-paying career and stay there (that is, I've never been laid off..so far) and deliberately did not have many children or take vacations or have lucked into not getting sick.
We are both in the same boat; you just have the "advantage", useless for anything it is, of never having thought you were on land.
Exactly this, though I also propose as the end of your sentence, "...as CEOs and investors claim." We get told a lot of false or true-but-in-the-abstract motives.
The McSweeney's article[0] nails it perfectly for me. I am in the gap in the middle, where stable pensions were on the way out at the same time as companies dropped loyalty to employees into the bin. So I started my working life with the cultural expectation that existed--work for the same company, or maybe two companies, for 40ish years, then leave the workforce knowing I'd be stable--and am now expected to cover all of my years of life solely from the resources I can scrounge together. This, in a word, sucks, and it's part of why layoffs--especially when companies are still hiring in other areas is so jarring to me.
(Does it suck more than the generation or two who have come after me, who had neither the expectation of a pension or potential job stability? No! It's far worse for those later than me; their only "benefit" is people younger than me didn't start out with that false hope. They've always known they're screwed unless they can horde as much as possible in as little time as possible.)
0 - https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-ha...
Prior to a 1914 change in the nationality law, a German citizen lost citizenship if they lived outside of Germany for more than 10 years and didn't file to retain citizenship. The general case is thus "after 1904."
Other common criteria are that the chain of citizenship is unbroken, that no parent naturalized elsewhere (also a loss of citizenship without permission to retain) prior to the child being born and no voluntary military service (with some exceptions for EU and NATO depending on year).
In my world, everyone counts including the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes...alongside the people who do not yet live there and thus have no voice.
I am vehemently opposed to ladder-pulling in all its forms.
> But minimizing real concerns of people that are the stakeholders isn't fair.
I do not believe I am minimizing their real concerns, I believe I am putting them on the same footing as other real concerns, concerns which people who want to act insular have no motivation to consider. Concerns like the state bill in question here attempts to balance.
Cities change or they die. The world is full of inconveniences and problems related to change but it is not fair to use the regulatory power of the state to insist that a hamlet remain as-is in perpetuity. There are strategies to mitigate those inconveniences instead of "nope, not here."
> I fully support enforcing new developments having to use certain materials and be restricted to certain sizes, styles, and layouts.
In a perfect world, I would be fine with this, but we do not live in a perfect world and these restrictions are more often used as a fig leaf to keep people out than they are to maintain a character. Hell, the phrase "neighborhood character" is very often used as a code phrase for keeping out "those people", whomever is the villain of the day (often renters or people who want to buy but who can't or don't want to buy a massive structure).
These sorts of rules can be useful--look at Leavenworth in Washington State, for example--but, in a lot of places in the United States and especially on the West Coast, they are impossible-to-meet predicates for exclusion.
And that's not fair.
It definitely is. I work in IT but one of my kids is in land use planning and they have regaled me with many stories of how builders come to the city (not in California) with plans. All of them involve a zoning variance and, more often than not, a trip through what is called Design Review. If the zoning change doesn't kill it--usually because they want a departure from what is called "floor area ratio" rules or from the "wedding cake" style zoning that is supposed to keep zones of detached housing "safe" from "impacts"--then design review absolutely does. Which dovetails into...
> made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies
...your other point. It's fine to not like the design of a particular building, but to enforce design aesthetic onto someone else is also a failing of zoning. Design review is often used as a cudgel to "catch" what zoning doesn't (so the rules say this kind of building is allowed but neighbors don't want it) and then administrivia it into, if not oblivion, then a very expensive project through things like "more building modulation" and "tamp down building massing" and "mitigate shadow impacts".
> demolishing beautiful, sustainably-built housing with shoddy, ugly, mass-produced 5-over-1s
YES. BECAUSE THAT'S ALL MODERN ZONING PERMITS. WHICH IS PRECISELY THE [bad word] PROBLEM.
In our haste, particularly on the West Coast, to ensure that we build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody, we've made zoning codes that produce THIS OUTCOME.
There's a reply upthread that says that density advocates want to cram everyone into Soviet-style "dystopian" high rises and, to be honest, your reply here sounds a lot like that.
A WORLD of difference exists between "detached dwelling on a 7,500 square foot lot" and "clone stamp 5-over-1 with empty retail on the bottom." BUT ZONING DOESN'T PERMIT IT. We absolutely should be building rowhouses and stacked flats and plaza housing and all of the other beautiful, people-scale-yet-still-dense, workable housing types that have been tried all over the planet yet America thinks we're too god damn special to have because "American Dream".
If you have rules that say you can only build 5-over-1s, it should come as no shock at all when those are the only things being built, especially in the very tiny slice of areas where it's permitted to build anything dense at all.